Quotes About Progress

I am ineluctably drawn to the gloomy conclusion that the genius of the American people will drive them into ever tightening bonds of enslavement to technological progress. Out of this the machine will emerge triumphant, man will concern himself exclusively with its maintenance, and we shall all sing, "Oh say, does that star-spangled banner still wave O'er the land of TV and the home of the slave.

The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Thse who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.

The wisest mind hath something yet to learn.

The wisest man has something yet to learn.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.

Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.

For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.

Mein Leben durchgestürmt; erst gross und mächtig, Nun aber geht es weise, geht bedächtig.

I myself am my only obstacle to perfection," wrote Kierkegaard.

The athlete doesn't stop smoking and start training. He starts training and finds he has stopped smoking.

Growth means change and change involves risk, stepping from the known to the unknown.

The main obstacle to further progress on the resource curse is China, and to a lesser extent India.

Unfortunately, we find systems of education today which have departed so far from the plain truth, that they now teach us to be proud of what we know and ashamed of ignorance. This is doubly corrupt. It is corrupt not only because pride is in itself a mortal sin, but also because to teach pride in knowledge is to put up an effective barrier against any advance upon what is already known, since it makes one ashamed to look beyond the bonds imposed by one's ignorance.

The age of the book is almost gone.

It took ten months for me to learn to tie a lace; I must have howled with rage and frustration. But one day I could tie my laces. I profoundly distrust the pedagogy of ease.

If you don't leave the past in the past, it will destroy your future. Look at what's in front of you, not what yesterday took away. The best is yet to come.

That remains part of the problem—that we don't know the unpleasant aspects of American history...and therefore we don't learn the lesson those chapters have to teach us. So we repeat them over and over again.

The wheel of democracy turns slowly.

I think we learn more from those times in our history where we stumbled as a democracy than we learn from the glorious chapters.

Governments, churches, and educational institutes, once the keepers of order and social enlightenment, are now scrambling to remain relevant as our collective consciousness and connectivity grows.

Science fiction is more than just our collective dreams for a human race that reaches to the stars. In many ways, the dreams of yesterday are becoming the realities of today and the path for tomorrow.